Page 43 of Fierce-Colson

“Yeah, my thought also, but not my life. She was trash. It’s harsh to say, but she was. Was a server in his favorite bar. He went to a lot of them, and that was his favorite. Not sure how they started to date. I think she just needed a place to crash more than anything.”

“Seriously?”

“That was what I gathered. She moved in with my father pretty quickly, then found out she was pregnant. I doubt it was planned, but once she was, they got married.”

“And where is she now?”

“No fucking clue,” he said. “She took off when Bella was two. Left a toddler with a man who wasn’t even sober half of his life. Somehow he managed to hold down a job and care for her.”

She closed her eyes and let out a sigh. “Were you close?”

“With Bella back then? No. I’d seen her a handful of times. I barely talked to my father. I was stunned when I found out he was having a kid, but I didn’t want any part of it. I stopped in once in a while, met Bella, but with our age difference, and what I had going on in my life, I didn’t have time for any of that.”

“Did you feel guilty looking back?” she asked.

He blew out a breath. “I did. Just like I did with the words spoken to my mother. But again, I can’t or couldn’t change the past. I won’t get into all the times I bailed my father out of shit. When he needed money, when he got arrested. You name it, that’s when he called me.”

“Poor Bella. Holly had no family around?”

“Not that I knew of. I never asked much either. When I got the call two years ago that he’d died—woke me up in the middle of the night—I thought it was a case. The first words out of my mouth were asking if he was alone.”

She remembered Robert dying in the middle of the night. “Did you think he would have Bella with him?”

“No. But I wouldn’t have known if he had another woman or man with him.”

“Were you not able to find Holly and that is how you ended up with Bella?”

“My father, for as much of a piece-of-shit dad as he was, he’d actually had a will done. Just one online, but he’d named me as Bella’s guardian. Maybe he knew that with his lifestyle he wasn’t going to live long enough for her to get on her own. I don’t know. I had no clue of that for a week after his death.”

She had to know this. She knew he’d be honest. “Was there a moment where you didn’t want to keep her?”

“I’m not going to lie, Marly. Here I am living life coming and going when I want, barely home, let alone cooking for myself, living in this tiny apartment I don’t have to take care of because I don’t have the time to do it. Then I’ve got this eleven-year-old girl. Girl. Not boy. But girl. I know nothing about girls that age and now I’ve got to raise one. So yeah, I’m having doubts. I tried to find her mother, but no luck. There was no way I was letting her go into foster care, so those brief thoughts fled as quickly as they came.”

“You’re a good man, Colson.”

“Few think that.”

“They’d be wrong,” she said.

She put her glass down and scooted closer to him on the couch. He dropped his arm over her shoulder.

“Did I pass your questioning?”

“For now,” she said, her smile lifting the corners of her cheeks. “Did I pass yours?”

“You were never going to fail,” he whispered, then dropped his mouth to hers.

The kiss was slow. Careful. Like he was giving her time to change her mind even as he stole her breath.

She didn’t. She wouldn’t.

Her fingers curled into the front of his shirt instead, her body shifting and feeling the solid warmth of him, the steady patience in the way he kissed her like there was nowhere else he needed to be. No rush. No proving anything. Just lips brushing, then pressing, then lingering.

God. This was a mistake.

A delicious one.

He was temptation on a candy-coated stick and she had the biggest, sweet tooth around.